The Conversation (1974)
 


PG,1hr 53min

Genres:Action,Drama
Released: January 1, 1974
Director:Francis Ford Coppola
Distributor:Paramount Pictures
 
Starring:
Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield 
 
Synopsis
Made between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II
(1974), and in part an homage to Michelangelo Antonioni's art-
movie classic Blow-Up (1966), The Conversation was a return to
small-scale art films for Francis Ford Coppola. Sound surveillance
expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is hired to track a young couple
(Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), taping their conversation as
they walk through San Francisco's crowded Union Square. Knowing
full well how technology can invade privacy, Harry obsessively keeps
to himself, separating business from his personal life, even refusing to
discuss what he does or where he lives with his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr).
Harry's work starts to trouble him, however, as he comes to believe that
the conversation he pieced together reveals a plot by the mysterious
corporate "Director" who hired him to murder the couple. After he allows
himself to be seduced by a call girl, who then steals the tapes, Harry is
all the more convinced that a killing will occur, and he can no longer
separate his job from his conscience. Coppola, cinematographer Bill
Butler, and Oscar-nominated sound editor Walter Murch convey the
narrative through Harry's aural and visual experience, beginning with the
slow opening zoom of Union Square accompanied by the alternately
muddled and clear sound of the couple's conversation caught by Harry's
microphones. The Godfather Part II and The Conversation earned Coppola
a rare pair of Oscar nominations for Best Picture, as well as two nominations
for Best Screenplay (The Godfather Part II won both). Praised by critics,
The Conversation was not a popular hit, but it has since come to be seen
as one of the artistic high points of the decade, as well as of Coppola's
career. Its atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, combined with its obsessive
loner antihero, made it prototypical of the darker "American art movies" of the
early '70s, as its audiotape storyline also made it seem eerily appropriate for
the era of the Watergate scandal. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide


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